All pictures are under artificial light

Essie Marshmallow and Zoya Raven

Let me start off by saying that I think this might be one of my all-time favorite manicures!  Not only do I think it looks really cool and edgy, it was also really simple to create.  I first saw this manicure through a Refinery29.com link about runway manicures.  This was the look that the models in the Wayne Spring 2012 runway show rocked.  It was done by CND and was called “Black Swan Graffiti Nails”.  I instantly fell in love with this look and saved it on my “Nail Ideas” board on Pinterest.  Since this was a runway look, it was my obvious choice for Day 4 of the Girly-Girl Challenge: Inspired by the Runway.

I started with a base color of Essie’s Marshmallow.  This polish is very thin and streaky – even with 3 coats I still didn’t have full coverage (contrary to what I predicted in my last post).  But I still really like this white because its so soft looking, and its totally different from my other white polish, OPI’s Alpine Snow – which is much more opaque and hard looking.  I then used Zoya’s Raven to add the black “graffiti” tips.  Raven is very opaque so I had no problems with it and didn’t have to go over the strokes more than once.  I used one of my fan nail art brushes and a small square tipped brush and just made random small brush strokes.  I didn’t want too much polish on the brushes, that way some of the strokes would look light and feathery.  And as always, I sealed everything in with a layer of top coat.  I was a little skeptical on my ability to recreate this look, but it looks  a lot more more complicated than it is, and I am super happy with the final product!

I loved this manicure so much, that I was really sad when I had to take it off after two days in order to do my St. Patrick’s Day manicure :/  So I think I will have to use this graffiti technique with some other colors so I can wear something similar in the future (but I don’t know if anything can live up to the black and white combination…)

Products used:

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 18th, 2012 at 10:55 am and is filed under Creme Finsih, Essie, Girly-Girl Nail Art Challenge, Zoya. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.